You set my soul alight

Right, this is my theory of supermassive black holes.

Let’s say you’re a physicist who finds the Theory of Everything. You’ve reconciled relativity and quantum mechanics, and reckon you know how black holes work. But you can’t test your ToE, as all experiments would need to take place within the black hole’s event horizon. Annoying.

So once you get really, really old you think ‘aah, screw it’, and take your little spaceship on a suicide run into the nearest black hole – probably the one at the centre of your own galaxy, since it’s closest. Inside you run your experiments, in the hope you’ll die a happy, if spaghettified, death.

I reckon this has probably happened a lot during the last 13.7 billion years. Entire civilisations of scientists have finished physics, they reckon, and come to their own moments of ‘aah, screw it’.

I put it to you that much of the currently-unexplained mass of supermassive black holes is dead physicists.